Pi Patel can tell a story that makes you believe in God, butAng Lee has gone one better: he has made a film that restores your faith in cinema.

Life of Pi is the Taiwanese director’s 12th feature; a warm, wise and wondrous adventure story adapted from Yann Martel’s 2002 Booker Prize-winning novel. Its kaleidoscopic 3D imagery is some of the most technologically advanced ever to appear on film, but the story unfolds with such simplicity and clarity, it could almost be a silent movie.

There are only two characters on screen for the most part: the teenage boy Pi (Suraj Sharma, a non-actor recruited during open auditions), and Richard Parker, an adult Bengal tiger who shares a name, due to an administrative error, with the hunter who captured him. Both are victims of a shipwreck in the South Pacific, and for over an hour of the film’s 127-minute running time, we watch nothing more than the pair warily coexisting in a lifeboat.

This tiger’s eyes shine, his nostrils flare, his flanks ripple with life — and yet he doesn’t exist. The animal and the ocean, and sometimes even Pi himself, are wholly digital creations, but Lee invests them all with the same reach-out-and-grab-it realness as the house that collapses on Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill, Jr (1928).

In that film, we wince as the window frame almost glances Keaton’s cheek — just as in Life of Pi, we duck and flinch as a shoal of flying fish skim across the ocean’s surface, whistling like silver arrows past Pi’s head. That’s partly down to Lee’s artful use of 3D, but also because, like Keaton, he knows how to make his audience feel the solidity and palpability of the story he is telling, no matter how outlandish it may be. With enough money and technology, any studio-backed hack can make objects jump out of the cinema screen. Lee makes us yearn to jump into it.

Life of Pi draws together notes and themes from many of Lee’s staggeringly diverse earlier projects: the poetic physicality of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), the elemental drama of Brokeback Mountain (2005), even the benign psychedelia of Taking Woodstock (2009).

It begins with a neat, anecdotal prologue that allows us to acclimatise to the film world’s gentle magic. In a snug family home in Montreal, Canada, the middle-aged Pi (Irrfan Khan) tells an eagerly listening writer (Rafe Spall) about his childhood in Pondicherry, on the Bay of Bengal, where his father managed a zoo.

We hear how the young Pi (Ayush Tandon as a boy, and later Sharma) was named Piscine Molitor Patel after his uncle’s favourite swimming pool in Paris, and how he collected religions like football stickers: “Thank you, Vishnu, for introducing me to Christ,” he says in a bedtime prayer, after adding Christianity to his booming portfolio.

Pi’s father (Adil Hussain) takes a dim view, but more pressing financial concerns rear their head, and he is forced to close the zoo and sell the animals to a wildlife park in Canada. The family decide to emigrate on the same ship as their menagerie, but the freighter is wrecked during a storm – a scene that crackles with so much visceral excitement that it puts most summer blockbusters to shame.

And this is how Pi and the tiger end up on the lifeboat, a sequence that plays out something like Robert Zemeckis’s Cast Away (2000) by way of CS Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Here, the divinity Pi sought in childhood is made manifest in thunderous tempests, galaxies of bioluminescent plankton, mysterious islands with secrets at their core — and the constant struggle for survival of a young man who must share an 18ft lifeboat with a 9ft hungry carnivore.

These scenes are perfectly paced, elegantly plotted and often very funny: there’s a universality about Lee’s film that transcends barriers of language and age. (Setting aside the occasional scary growl from Richard Parker, there is nothing here unsuitable for children.)

This, not the vapid fanboy pandering of Peter Jackson’s nine-hour Hobbity slog — yes, this is fantasy cinema. One man, alone with his wonderment, suspended between sky and sea.